s art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree
unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand
apart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at the
centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his
experiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,
and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe:

"Spaet erklingt was frueh erklang;
Glueck und Unglueck wird Gesang."

Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he had
conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said
well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and
unexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature he
loved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an
idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which
even make us dangerous to existing institutions--such I call good
books." He did not think them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he
says, "even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will
always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valour and
generosity we have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easily
written. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more
than great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level
height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet
often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again,
shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a
Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay,
whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student.
For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and
those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of
utterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English
for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like
poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to
Milton's "Areopagitica," and can name no other instance for the moment.
Two things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothing
more commonplace in the way of readin